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Lazy as a cloud, the black-hulled, three-masted schooner Creole loafed along the coast of Spain last week. To gay music on the intercom, the 190-ft. Creole, world's biggest privately owned sailing vessel, stole past silver-sanded coves and pastel villages. On sunny afternoons, while the schooner lay at anchor, passengers dipped in the warm water or sipped in cafes ashore. After dark, white-gloved stewards moved unobtrusively among the guests in a softly lighted dining room hung with French impressionist paintings. Pushed by gentle winds, the Creole headed at week's end for the island of Mallorca. the golden isle of the Hesperides, to which Hercules, of Greek legend, once sailed in search of the Golden Apples.
Lord of the 697-ton Creole, and the hero of a new Greek legend, is Stavros Spyros Niarchos, 47, world's biggest independent shipowner. The legend of Niarchos, fondly referred to in the world's press as the "Golden Greek," is a blurred montage of shipboard launching parties, at which he bestows diamond bracelets and gold Faberge cigarette boxes on the beautiful and highborn women (e.g., the Duchess of Kent) who christen his ships, repartee in the royal enclosure at Ascot, champagne flowing like home brut in the nightclubs of London and Paris. Unlike most legends, it is woven from whole fact.
When the world's most prized collection of antique French silver went on sale.
Niarchos put up $250,000 to keep it intact for the Louvre. On his visits to Greece, Niarchos hands out gold sovereigns on the streets of Athens like a rich man's John D. Rockefeller. Some of his more offhand gestures have included chartering a steamship for a royalty-only romp in 1954 chaperoned by Greece's Queen Frederika. Niarchos obligingly provided another steamer last summer so that Elsa Maxwell could take an all-star supporting cast (Olivia de Havilland, Aly Khan, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll) on a Mediterranean junket while Niarchos cruised the other end of the sea aboard the Creole; he was "too busy" to go along.
Million-Dollar Answers. The Creole is more than a princely pleasure barge; it is also the flagship from which Niarchos directs the far-flung fleet of 48 merchantmen that carry his initial, a sprawling N, on their smokestacks. Each morning last week, while his guests still lay abed, Niarchos settled himself at a desk in his fawn-carpeted stateroom. With an unlighted Papastratos No. 1 cigarette between his lips, he pored over an 18-in.
stack of overnight cables, dictated answers involving millions of dollars. One day last week, in a radio message to his London office. Niarchos approved final specifications for a new 32,650-ton tanker (cost: more than $10 million).
Even without this addition, there is no doubt that Niarchos has more ships afloat and abuilding than any private shipowner in the world. When the 28 new ships under construction are completed, Niarchos' fleet will total 1,976,779 deadweight tons,* five times the size of the French navy.